Another View: U.S. can't put off tax reform any longer

Another View

5:04 PM,
Nov. 16, 2013

Written by

Lee H. Hamilton

As Congress moves forward on budget negotiations, the word out of Washington is to expect nothing major: no grand bargain, just more stop-gap, short-term fixes.

Yet there's one ray of hope. The House and Senate chairs of the tax-writing committees, one a Republican, the other a Democrat, are preparing a comprehensive tax reform plan. They see the budget negotiations as their opportunity to enact much-needed changes to our bloated, off-kilter tax laws.

The last time lawmakers managed to find a way to simplify and reshape the tax code was almost three decades ago, in 1986, when Ronald Reagan ...